What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

Politics is the art of the possible.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

He may be a patriot for Austria, but the question is whether he is a patriot for me.

I shall be an autocrat: that’s my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that’s his.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.